| James Cawthorn | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1719  |
| Died | 1761 |
James Cawthorn (sometimes spelt Cawthorne) was born in Sheffield on 4 November 1719 and died in Tonbridge on 15 April 1761. A school master in holy orders, he was a minor English poet and imitator of Alexander Pope.
James Cawthorn was the son of a Sheffield upholsterer and cabinet-maker. He was first educated at Sheffield Grammar School, and then in 1735 was sent to school at Kirkby Lonsdale, where he began writing poetry. No copy remains of the first of his poems to be published, “The Perjured Lover or tragical adventures of Alexis and Boroina, in heroic verse, from the story of Inkle and Yarico” (Sheffield 1736). That year too he was employed as a teaching assistant in Rotherham. Although he matriculated at Clare College, Cambridge, in 1738, he does not seem to have stayed there and is next heard of as an assistant to Martin Clare, head of an academy at 8 Soho Square, [1] whose daughter Mary he married.
In 1743 Cawthorn was made head master of Tonbridge School, by which time he had taken holy orders and sometime later was styling himself M.A. The lasting memorial of his incumbency there was the library that he persuaded the Governors to build at the south end of the school in 1756, which survives today as the Headmaster's house and the Skinners' Library. A few poems and sermons of his now began to be published; principally, however, his poems were declaimed on the annual visitation days from the Worshipful Company of Skinners, who were the school's patrons. The poet Robert Southey facetiously remarked in his brief notes on Cawthorn that “He was fond of riding other horses besides that which he borrowed of the Muses,” [2] and it was remembered of him that, as an admirer of concerts and operas, he had been known to ride to London in order to be present at a musical performance, returning in time for the start of school at seven next morning. [3] Eventually he died after being thrown from his horse in April, 1761. His grave in Tonbridge church is marked by a Latin epitaph on a marble tablet.
It was not until 1771 that Cawthorn's poems were collected and printed by subscription. They were for the most part ethical epistles and moral poems in the manner of Alexander Pope. Sometimes, it was noted in Alexander Chalmers' General Biographical Dictionary, "his imitations are so close as to appear the effect rather of memory than of judgment". [4] Echoes of Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard" might be expected in Cawthorn's reply, "Abelard to Eloisa" (1747). However, his other attempt at an Ovidian heroic epistle, "Lady Jane Grey to Lord Guildford Dudley" (1753), suggests the influence of his real model in its very first line: "From these dark cells in sable pomp arrayed", which echoes that of Pope's epistle, "In these deep solitudes and awful cells". Yet another echo from the same source occurs in Cawthorn's "On Taste" (1756), where the line "In the pure sunshine of the soul divine" seems a half-memory of Pope's "The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind".
Though his poem "On Taste" takes the fourth of Pope's "Moral Essays" as its starting point, the examples he gives make original fun of the contemporary fad for chinoiserie:
The independent observation there has been quoted by later critics as acute evidence of the change in fashion since the Classicism of Pope's day. [5] Another critic has remarked on the original way Cawthorn's verse essays mediate to a later middle class audience the "aristocratic ethics" originally propounded by the Earl of Shaftesbury. [6]
Though Cawthorn's “Abelard and Eloisa” followed in the train of the earlier imitations of Pope that were written immediately on its publication, there had been none since 1730. His poem of 1747 not only heads a new wave of them but seems to have been the most continuously reprinted. Before his posthumous 1771 collection, it had reappeared in The Poetical Calendar (1763) and George Pearch's Collection of Poems in Two Volumes (1768). [7] By 1781 it had joined Pope's original in John Hughes’ The Letters of Abelard and Heloise: with a particular account of their lives, amours, and misfortune, [8] a work that, with later additions, continued in print not only in Britain but in Europe and the United States well into the 19th century.
Besides subsequent reprints of Cawthorn’s collected poems in one format or another, there was one other popular source for the poem, or its opening lines at least. These had been set as "Abelard: a sacred glee" by John Wall Callcott and the words alone appeared in The poetry of various glees, songs, &c (London, 1798), [9] of which there were many later reproductions. As late as 1843, both words and music were included in The British Minstrel. [10] Despite the caviling of critics that the poem fell short of its original model, the conclusion to be drawn from its persistence for a century after its original appearance is of a popularity outlasting his other works.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."
Alexander Pope was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, Pope is best known for his satirical and discursive poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism, and for his translations of Homer.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1713.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1733.
William Whitehead was an English poet and playwright. He became Poet Laureate in December 1757 after Thomas Gray declined the position.
Eloisa to Abelard is a verse epistle by Alexander Pope that was published in 1717 and based on a well-known medieval story. Itself an imitation of a Latin poetic genre, its immediate fame resulted in a large number of English imitations throughout the rest of the century and other poems more loosely based on its themes thereafter. Translations of varying levels of faithfulness appeared across Europe, starting in the 1750s and reaching a peak towards the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th. These were in the vanguard of the shift away from Classicism and towards the primacy given emotion over reason that heralded Romanticism. Artistic depictions of the poem's themes were often reproduced as prints illustrating the poem; there were also paintings in France of the women readers of the amorous correspondence between the lovers.
Leonard Welsted was an English poet and "dunce" in Alexander Pope's writings. Welsted was an accomplished writer who composed in a relaxed, light hearted vein. He was associated with Whig party political figures in his later years, but he was tory earlier, and, in the age of patronage, this seems to have been more out of financial need than anything else.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
John Hughes was an English poet, essayist and translator. Various of his works remained in print for a century after his death, but if he is remembered at all today it is for the use others made of his work. Texts of his were set by the foremost composers of the day and his translation of the Letters of Abelard and Heloise was a major source for Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard.
Judith Madan was an English poet. She was the granddaughter of the diarist, Sarah, Lady Cowper (1644–1720) and aunt of the poet William Cowper. She was a correspondent, admirer and protégé of Alexander Pope prior to her marriage, and she composed an admired early-gothic work, Abelard to Eloisa, as a response to Pope's Eloisa to Abelard.
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Thomas Warwick was a poet and unbeneficed clergyman of Cornish origin, born about 1755, died after 1785. He took part in the revival of the sonnet form at the end of the 18th century and his other writing included odes and poems on mediaeval subjects. His behaviour was described as eccentric and he died early in a carriage accident.
Cawthorne, Martin J 'James Cawthorn, George Austen and The Curious Case of the Schoolboy Who was Killed' Matador 2017 ISBN 978 1785898 600
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